UltraViolet Backers See Content in the Cloud

There’s a new logo in the future of video lovers. Or at least that’s what many heavy hitters from the content, hardware and retailing worlds hope.

That would be UltraViolet, the name for a new format that is designed to break through what backers say are some key obstacles that are slowing down purchases of digital movies and TV shows. One of the biggest fears among consumers, they say, is that a movie they download or buy on disk will someday become lost or hard to access–because their computer or other hardware might crash, formats might change or other issues.

A consortium called the Digital Entertainment Content System, or DECE, has been working on a solution for some time now. They plan to offer a scheme under which consumers, instead of buying just a disk or a digital file, essentially buy a perpetual right to a piece of content. If they lose the original copy, there will always be one they can access in the cloud, as people in Silicon Valley like to put it.

“It’s our time, the digital industry, to just do a do-over,” said Mitch Singer, chief technology officer for Sony Pictures.

Other companies represented at on a panel discussion before a standing-room-only audience at CES included Microsoft, NBC Universal, Samsung, Best Buy and Warner Bros.

Mark Teitell, DECE’s general manager, gave a progress report on the effort. The organization has completed the basic specifications for the content-management features of UltraViolet, he said. Now it’s down to companies to implement the technology.

The idea, Teitell said, is that consumers will see the UltraViolet logo and know that they get access to a perpetual copy of any content they buy. He said those logos may start appearing on content as soon as the middle of 2011.

There were two absent elephants in the room–Apple, operator of the trend-setting iTunes store for digital content, and Walt Disney, which has been working on a rival scheme called KeyChest.

Participants in the discussion acknowledged the missing participants, but expressed optimism that they would support DECE at some point. J.B. Perrette, president of digital and affiliate distribution for NBC Universal, discounted the notion of a format war. After all, he suggested, it’s everybody else against just two companies.